


what i wouldn't gif

by morallygreywaren



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: "you're wrong and I need to fuck you about it", (used very lightly), Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Office, Anal Sex, Community: theoldguardkinkmeme, Enemies to Lovers, I saw the words, M/M, Office Romance, Office Sex, Prompt Fill, and I'm afraid I was done for, but they do fall in love along the way, it's gif not jif, so this whole fic is just a variation of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:42:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28146291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morallygreywaren/pseuds/morallygreywaren
Summary: "Well, what do you want to do about it?" Nicky swallows.Joe leans in to whisper in his ear, his beard tickling Nicky's throat, and Nicky needs to concentrate not to shiver. "I don't think what I want to do about it would be appropriate for a workplace environment."Nicky raises an eyebrow. "Do you want to take this outside?""No."Is there anything Joe and Nicky won't argue about? It seems unlikely.Are the increasingly harebrained arguments just an excuse to have sex? Absolutely.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 54
Kudos: 329





	what i wouldn't gif

**Author's Note:**

> The prompt was "enemies to lovers, but they're the most ridiculous enemies ever", which I read as "dumbasses to lovers", so naturally, here we are.
> 
> Whoever suggested "it's gif, not jif" - you're a genius, and as the title suggests, I completely ran with that idea. Enjoy!

"Andy's gone home for the night." Nicky knocks on Joe's desk as he passes it on the way to pull on his own jacket. "She's asking if you're okay to schedule one more tweet for tomorrow with the gif she signed off earlier?"

Joe glares at him over the top of his screen. "Is that what she said."

Nicky keeps his face carefully neutral. If he grins now he might as well admit defeat. "Yes?"

Joe's eyebrows lazily crawl up his forehead "She said I should use the-" and he mimics Nicky's pronunciation with a soft g, " _-jif_?"

"Yes. Is there a problem with it, do you need me to call her back?"

The truth is, of course, that Andy has said no such thing. Or rather, Nicky overheard her asking Joe to schedule some tweets earlier, which he knows Joe has already done. Joe knows that Nicky knows this of course, because the office they share is the size of a shoebox. And with Andy gone they're the last ones there.

"No, there's no problem with the _gif_ for tomorrow's tweet." Joe scowls, and closes his laptop. Lets the hard g at the beginning of the word hang in the room. "I just find it hard to believe that Andy would pronounce it like that. Because Andy tends to be right about things, and that pronunciation is not."

Nicky turns away as he fiddles with his scarf because he really can't keep a smile from his face now. "What? _Jif_?"

"Right, that's it." Joe gets up and stalks over to where Nicky is standing next to the coat stand, reaching for his jacket. His hand is right next to Nicky's face, and he's not taking it away.

"That's what?" 

Joe is really very… close all of a sudden. And he's just cut off Nicky’s way to the door.

"The last straw. You know it's not pronounced that way."

"Well, what do you want to do about it?" Nicky swallows. 

Joe leans in to whisper in his ear, his beard tickling Nicky's throat, and Nicky needs to concentrate not to shiver. "I don't think what I _want_ to do about it would be appropriate for a workplace environment."

Nicky raises an eyebrow. "Do you want to take this outside?"

"No." 

Joe growls when Nicky leans in to kiss him, wastes no time slipping his tongue into his mouth. It shouldn’t be as hot as it is, being kissed by your coworker over the most inconsequential argument ever, but if Nicky is honest with himself, it never was about that anyway.

Joe presses him against the wall next to the coat stand, and Nicky's arches into him, for some reason going from zero to a hundred with barely any preamble at all. Nicky's coat ends up on the floor in seconds, followed by his scarf, then Joe's shirt. 

He moans into Joe's mouth, shameless in a way that only a dry spell lasting months and months can bring on. It's not really a surprise when they end up fucking where they stand, bringing each other off with their hands as they pant into each other's mouths.

This is how it starts.

* * *

Although technically, it starts two months before that. Andy hires both of them for her start-up, and their first days end up being on the same date. 

"Joe, this is Nicky," Andy introduces them, "I know I said I was looking for a replacement for Lykon when I was interviewing both of you, but we've just had some grant money come through and it looks like things are about to get busy."

Joe applied for the job because he was both bored _and_ micromanaged at his last one, so busy sounds perfect to him. 

“You both have pretty complementary skill sets, so I think this should work out nicely,” Andy continues, “How about we go get coffee so we can discuss priorities for the week and you can get to know each other a bit better?”

The job advertised was basically that of a right hand man, but Joe doesn’t mind that he’s going to be sharing that job if it means he can do more of the things he likes doing and is good at at the same time. He only hopes Nicky sees this the same way. Start-ups can attract all sorts of characters, and not all of them pleasant. 

But Nicky and the small smile he gives him as he holds open the door for Joe seem nice enough. And his eyes. And his shoulders. And the wide, wide hands holding the door. If Andy had told him that the only other employees were Nicky, and from time to time her wife Quynh before she hired him, he’d probably have asked if she was running an undercover modelling agency. There was no other explanation for the density of attractive people in a basement flat doubling as an office.

But even with Joe’s more or less instant attraction to the man, Joe and Nicky get along for exactly the five minutes it takes them to go to the nearest coffee shop. Then Joe orders a vanilla latte with soya milk and cream on top, and hears Nicky make a disgusted sound behind him.

“Not a fan of coffee shop coffee?” Joe asks.

Nicky gives him an indignant look. “That. Is not coffee.”

It sort of goes downhill from there. It’s not that Nicky and Joe don’t see eye to eye on anything at all. Arguably, they do on all the most important things: What needs to be prioritised for Andy’s business for the next couple of months, who should take over which projects and and how they might set up their office. Andy was right in thinking that Joe’s skills - creative planning - and Nicky’s - interpersonal and analytical - were a great match for the role. It’s more that they absolutely do not seem to be able to have a casual conversation without running into a disagreement about some minor issue.

By the time their first day at work is nearly over, they're arguing over the right way to load paper into a printer when Andy walks in on them. 

"Brilliant," she says to their surprise when they stop to stare at her, caught red-handed, "I was worried I'd have to run one of these companies where everyone pretends to be family. Carry on."

She wanders back out of their office, smiling. 

They do.

* * *

It sort of becomes a thing after the gif incident, as Nicky likes to think of it. What the thing is, exactly, he can't quite say - an office romance? hate sex with an insufferable colleague? co-workers with benefits? No, that sounds too much like something you'd find on the "Come Work With Us" section of their website. The only thing he knows is that it gets easier and easier to rile Joe up.

One day he comes back from a terrible investor meeting with Andy and Quynh - well, he comes back, Andy and Quynh have gone straight to the nearest bar - and says, still standing in the doorway: "I _hate_ Julia Roberts films."

He's not even sure Joe has a strong opinion on nineties rom-coms, but either way, the fifteen minutes Joe spends blowing his brains out under his desk are entirely worth it.

Most days, Nicky doesn’t think about it. Or that’s not quite true, he thinks about it _all the time_ , but he’s not too concerned about what exactly it is they are doing. Who cares what they are to each other as long as they’re both enjoying themselves? Not him.

On one memorable occasion, Nicky changes the music in their office to Nickelback in the middle of the day. Joe's reaction is instantaneous, even if it's just some flared nostrils over the top of his laptop. He ignores it though, otherwise. So Nicky decides to have a little fun with it and adjusts the volume incrementally until it is _impossible_ to ignore. Joe just exhales through his nose, very slowly, and sets his foot down under their desks right next to Nicky's. Presses in, and up, just a-

"Nicky, I know this is your idea of a pun, but if you don't turn that garbage down I'm going to send you home for the rest of the day!" Andy marches into their office, glowering. 

Nicky grins. "Sure, boss. Sorry."

"Get me a coffee and it's forgotten."

Nicky nods and gets up to reach for his scarf. "Can I get you something?" he asks Joe. 

And Joe smiles.

Nicky thought having to buy the frothy pink concoction that Joe has the audacity to call coffee would be payback enough, but he's also not surprised when Joe's hand closes around his wrist before he can leave at the end of the day. 

" _Nickelback_ ," Joe says, "Really?"

One of them must have made the conscious decision to keep condoms and lube in the office at some point, which makes Nicky think that really, there should be a name for this thing, but then. Is he going to complain about getting fucked over his desk until he comes so hard he's basically incoherent? Of course not. That was the entire point of the exercise.

The next day, Joe offers to get him something from his lunch place, in “return for the Frappuccino.” Nicky thinks about informing him that he’s willing to call it quits on the basis of the fact that he still can’t quite walk straight, but his stomach growls before he can say anything. 

“Where are you going?” he asks.

“Oh, I was just going to grab something from Jeon’s Kitchen. Have you been? You should go, it’s the best place to eat in Soho by a long shot.”

Nicky raises an eyebrow at Joe. “I doubt it’s better than Yeni’s.”

Joe stops in the doorway. “Can you really compare Korean and Mediterranean cuisine?”

“I don’t know.” Nicky shrugs. “You were the one who said Jeon’s Kitchen was the best place to eat in Soho.”

“And I stand by it.”

“Well, then you’re wrong. Again.” Nicky smiles at Joe, trying not to lick his teeth like a lazy cat that got the cream yet again, even though that is how he feels. He expects Joe to scowl at him, but instead he looks pensive, just knocking against the door frame, once, twice.

“You know what?” he says after a beat, “Why don’t I just get us some sandwiches for lunch, and we go to Yeni’s for dinner today and to Jeon’s tomorrow? Then we can decide objectively, for once.”

"What, like a date?" Nicky asks before he can stop himself, but Joe is already smiling.

"Yes, like a date." 

And that pretty much gives it a name.

* * *

Booker joins their team half a year later. 

Joe is happy about this development for multiple reasons: One, because he’s been getting a little busier than he anticipated being when Andy hired him, and the extra pair of hands is a welcome reprieve on his (and Nicky’s) evenings. And two, because Booker is good fun and they hit it off immediately. If that means that now two of Joe’s main social contacts are people he also works with, so be it. As long as Andy doesn’t find out. 

He only feels bad for Booker because instead of his own office, he just gets a desk tacked to the end of Joe and Nicky’s, which means he has a front seat to every single one of their ‘arguments’. They haven’t really said anything about the fact that they are seeing each other, but if Booker notices them playing footsie while discussing the relative merits of white grapes over red ones, he doesn’t say anything about it. So Joe figures they got the whole thing pretty much under wraps. Even though he misses lunchtime blowjobs.

The only near slip-up occurs during a monthly team meeting Andy insists on. Joe is catching the others up about how well his various social media strategies have been faring and is about to hand over to Nicky, when Booker points at his screen and asks: “Did you make that gif yourself?” 

Joe meets Nicky’s eyes over the conference table. Nicky raises his eyebrows.

“Oh, come on,” Andy says. 

Booker pronounces gif like _jif_ as well.

“What?”

“It’s not pronounced _jif_ ,” Andy says, “It’s clearly gif, with a hard g, that’s how the English language works.”

“Well, I’m French, and I can pronounce it how I want.”

“Yeah,” Nicky chimes in, “also, it’s not exactly how English works. Or how do you pronounce Gibraltar, or ginger, or giraffe?”

“Well actually,” Joe says, because he’s been dating Nicky for half a year at this point, he knows when he can get away with a well actually, “that’s an unfair comparison because none of those words are acronyms. Gif stands for Graphics Interchange Format, so it has a hard g. Or do you say _jraphics_ as well?”

“That… doesn’t sound right,” Booker says, “If you pronounce it as an acronym it becomes a new word. If the components were so important you could just say G-I-F.”

“And also,” Nicky starts, and Joe knows what’s coming, the trump card, because at this point, they’ve had this argument more times than he can count. It’s strangely effective foreplay - what can he say, he’s a sentimental man - and so Joe almost wishes he wouldn’t. He still has work to do after this, work that’s much easier to do if he has most of his blood in his head. “Steve Wilhite said it was pronounced _jif_ , so we should take his word for it.”

Booker frowns. “Who’s Steve Wilhite?”

“The guy who created gifs.” Nicky smiles innocently, and Joe has to suppress a groan for more than one reason. It’s not like they can sneak off to the bathroom to have a quickie anymore. Booker would _definitely_ notice that.

“Oh-kay.” Booker looks at Andy for help, who only rolls her eyes. 

“They’ve had this argument many times. Shall we get back to business?”

Joe nods, nudges Nicky to pick up where they left off, and then tries (and fails) not to look at his lips while he goes over the sales projections.

“We need to stop having sex at work,” Joe says later that evening. He left the office a little after Nicky - it was much easier to get things done once he didn’t have to look at the man every time he looked up from his laptop - then showed up at his flat, where Nicky was waiting with dinner.

“Okay?” Nicky says, and Joe can hear the frown in his voice. Which is fair, he supposes, given that he already has two fingers inside Joe. “But right now we are having sex here, in my bed? Which is not work, I hope, unless you need to tell me something?”

Joe smiles, and leans up to kiss Nicky, slow and deep, as an apology. He knows it’s been accepted when Nicky twists his fingers _just so_ , and Joe gasps into his mouth. 

“It’s just-- ngh--” Joe forces himself to exhale, relax, as Nicky pushes in, “--it’s so hot when you do that, you know.”

“Do what?” Nicky’s going slowly, inch by torturous inch, and it’s all Joe can do to just hold on to Nicky’s shoulders and not completely lose his train of thought.

“Argue about completely mindless things, even when you know you’re wrong. I shouldn’t find it so attractive, it drives me mad to be honest, but I just--” He shivers when Nicky’s finally buried up to the hilt and begins rocking in the slowest, smallest circles, just about brushing Joe’s prostate every time. It drives Joe wild, and Nicky knows, and Joe knows that Nicky knows, and that, if anything, is even hotter than the whole contrarian thing. “I can’t concentrate on anything when you do it, I think about all the times we did it in the office just because of your terrible, terrible opinions, and it makes it really, really hard to work.” 

He has to repeat some of his words because Nicky has picked up the pace and is now fucking him into the mattress with intent. 

“But you’re not at work now,” Nicky whispers into Joe’s ear, “Or do you need me to remind you?”

Joe’s usually mouthy in bed, which he likes to think does it for Nicky too, but there always comes a point when Nicky's endless patience wears thin. Now, he reaches under Joe's knee and pushes up his leg until he is completely spread open under Nicky, and every thrust strikes true. Like this, all Joe can do is nod.

"Ohhh, Nicky, yes, Nicky, yes there, there-" and he comes in hot stripes all over his belly. Joe slides his hands into Nicky's hair and looks up at him with glassy eyes until he can feel Nicky stutter to a halt, thrust in once, twice and come deep inside him. 

Nicky rests his forehead on Joe's as they catch their breaths, both of their eyes already drooping shut. By the time they've cleaned up and are curled around each other under the covers, Joe is half asleep. He's never told Nicky this, but it is his favourite time of the evening every time he stays over.

"You know what would make it easier not to have sex at work?" Nicky is absentmindedly stroking the back of Joe's fingers that are splayed wide over his sternum.

"Hmm?"

"If we knew we'd always be able to have sex at home, anyway. Would be more comfortable than the bathroom, too."

Joe laughs, noses along Nicky's neck as his grip around him tightens. "Is this your way of asking me to move in with you, Nicolò di Genova?"

"Doesn't have to be you moving _here_ ," Nicky says, and Joe feels him shrug against his chest, "But, yeah. Might be nice."

"It would," Joe says into Nicky's neck, and he doesn't think he imagines the fingers tightening around his own. Just before he slips off to sleep, he mumbles: "I'd have to update my address with HR, though."

Nicky sighs. "We don’t _have_ HR." 

Joe smiles so widely it nearly hurts. Nicky's not the only one who can make terrible jokes.

* * *

They do get a HR person when Andy hires Nile about a year after they started sleeping with each other. She's younger than the rest of them, and so bright it's almost a little scary, but when she makes Andy smile within thirty minutes of showing up at the office, Nicky knows that she is going to do brilliantly.

Andy calls him over to walk Nile through the payroll system, and Nicky shoots Joe a small smile before he goes to join them.

"We'll do a proper lunch where you can get to know everyone later, but for now, Nicky here is the one who’s going to train you up and help you get settled, and the other two idiots over there are Joe and Booker." The two of them stop to wave at Nile with varying degrees of enthusiasm when Andy mentions their names, and Nicky stifles a laugh. "If they give you any grief, feel free to pop into my office or give Quynh a call."

"Sounds good," Nile says. She’s nonchalantly eyeing the payroll database, but there's a mischievous grin on her face when she asks: "So, is it gonna be mandatory that I start going out with Booker, or will I be allowed to be single?"

"What?" Andy frowns. 

"Well, you're married to Quynh, and then there's Joe and Nicky, so I figured-"

"Oh, don't worry, Joe and Nicky aren't a couple, they just fight like one, so watch out for that," Andy says, and Booker nearly chokes on his cappuccino at the other end of the office. 

"Boss, if you think this is a normal amount of sex to be having between colleagues we need to talk about my objectives," he says, but he's clearly enjoying this.

"You knew?" Joe is actually blushing when Booker starts to laugh. It looks cute on him.

"Oh _please,_ " Booker says, "I've been sharing an office with you for nearly a year, and it's taken the new girl about half an hour to figure it out. Let's just say you are not subtle."

Nicky shares a sheepish grin with Joe. Or, he tries to share a sheepish grin with Joe. He’s pretty sure he’s full on beaming at him. It’s getting harder and harder not to do that every time Joe looks at him.

"Yeah," Nile says, "the fact there are only three addresses listed on the payroll system is a bit of a giveaway, too."

She winks at Nicky, and he smiles. They have been ridiculous for so long, it'll be nice to stop sneaking about. Nicky continues showing Nile the payroll system and ignores Andy who is sitting haplessly next to them until Quynh shows up with a coffee and a muffin as a welcome treat for Nile.

"My heart," Andy says to Quynh, "when did this happen?"

She's gesturing to where Nile is laughing at one of Nicky's jokes and Joe and Booker are trying to best each other throwing paper balls into the bin.

"When did what happen?" Quynh looks perplexed.

Andy sighs, but it's half-hearted. "Looks like I am running a company where everyone pretends to be family after all."

They all share a look with each other, and then they laugh as Andy lets her forehead sink onto the table, Quynh stroking comforting patterns in her back.

Nicky thinks about the ring he's currently keeping hiding in his desk drawer, but it isn't time to drop that particular bomb shell on Andy quite yet.

Joe has to say yes first. Which he undoubtedly will, when he hears how Nicky is planning to pronounce the word engagement. 

One way or another, that is.

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt fill for this [kink meme prompt](https://theoldguardkinkmeme.dreamwidth.org/5552.html?thread=1799856#cmt1799856):
> 
> _Pancakes vs. waffles. Caramel vs. caramel. Whatever it is that divides them, it's petty and inconsequential as all hell, but they and the rest of their friend groups take it seriously. Nicky and Joe, though, have found a way to look past the fact that the other ties his shoes the wrong way or prefers grape Fanta over orange. They're in love._


End file.
